Dutch Startup News: Scyfer, Stream.io, Solarus, don’t lie to yourself

2017-08-21 | Samir Saberi

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What happens in the startup scene in The Netherlands right now? Find out in another Dutch startup news update!

News & Updates

Startup in Residence releases 20 new social challenges
Startup in Residence, the incubator of the city of Amsterdam – challenges startups to join the incubator to solve 20 new social challenges and make the city a better place. Startups can now apply for the 6 month program, in which the city can be their playground and its inhabitants the launching customer. The third edition will run from December 2017 until May 2018. Applications are open until October 8 at midnight.

Funding

Tech celebrities backed startup Stream.IO raises new round of $3M

Amsterdam-based startup Stream has raised 3 million USD in a round led by North Dakota-based VC firm Arthur Ventures. The startup previously raised $1.75 million from, among others, tech scene celebrities Brad Feld and Darmash Shah. The money will mainly be used to accelerate product development.

Tech giant Qualcomm acquires Amsterdam-based AI startup Scyfer
Scyfer, an AI startup, has been acquired by the tech giant Qualcomm. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. As part of this transition the founder of Scyfer and professor Max Welling will help to further advance AI research and development at Qualcomm Technologies. The Scyfer team will remain to operate from Amsterdam. The deal can be classified as an acquihire.

Solar tech company Solarus raises €6.7 million to accelerate international expansion
Venlo-based tech company Solarus has raised 6.7 million euros in funding from a group of investors in a round led by ForestEffect Fund. The capital raised will be used to enhance the efficiency of Solarus’ hybrid solar collector systems and expand internationally. The company claims to be able to reach 1 billion in revenue in the next 5 to 7 years. Up till now some 1,500 systems are installed.

Monday afternoon read

Don’t lie to yourself
In operations research and systems thinking there is famous quote by one of its pioneers Russell L. Ackoff. This is the 1974 quote: ‘Successful problem solving requires finding the right solution to the right problem. We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem.’ CB has been compiling the top 20 reasons why startups fail since 2014. The top reason? Building a solution looking for a problem, i.e., not targeting a “market need.” The obvious solution is of course a data driven approach to finding the right problem and subsequently the right solution based on the lean startup methodology.

So how come so many entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs preach, but don’t practice lean startup thinking? The underlying reasons are our fear for rejection and failure and because of that we lie to everybody and most of all to ourselves. Even if its completely clear that we are not on the right track or we don’t have a clue of what the intricacies are of the problem we are trying to solve. Here is a great chapter in the phenomenal book Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz on how data can help you find the right product market fit or decide to pivot timely to something else.

Big brother is here, and his name is Facebook
If you also think that the big tech companies are gaining to much power and knowing too much about us you might like this discussion on Hacker News about Google and Facebook and the article that ignited the discussion.

Deep Learning for Computer Vision
If you’re interested or applying deep learning for you startup and computer vision this is a must see video of Andrej Karpathy of OpenAI.

Bye, Bye UK
For startups one of the most important reasons to open shop or move to London and UK in general was because of the venture capital industry. For many years the UK has been the country with largest sum of assets under management in the venture capital industry in Europe. But now because of the Brexit it’s bye, bye UK. “The pullback of the EIF puts the U.K. at a structural disadvantage compared to other European countries,” said Fred Destin, a London-based venture capitalist who previously worked for Accel in this Politico article about the consequences of the Brexit for the venture capital industry in the UK.

Entrepreneur | Co-founder @StartupsAnoniem, @StartupJuncture | Partner @StartupDelta | Node1| Tech Blogger| Samir is interested in and loves to work with crazy, dissident, rebel startups that challenge the status quo to make things better. Drop him a line at samir[at]startupjuncture[.]com